User Journey Maps

If you want to understand any new area start with user journey maps. Meeting stakeholders, having 30-60-90 plan, walking through architecture diagrams are helpful techniques. But it is always useful to understand user journey. Understand your user journey. Right from what are user entry points, down stream systems, dependencies, bottlenecks and response SLA's. This understanding at one level above architecture helps you to know what is expectation and it will lead to right questions on your architecture. You should deep dive on to underlying systems, OS versions, metrics, incident trends.
Incidents trend will help you in understanding amount of work you are handling, then dive into response and resolution SLA's, this will help you understand the discipline in support. Then try evaluate change success rate. Start diving into opportunities of automation in support. The analytics and trends you built in the first place will help you to find the opportunities for improvement. Look for processes you can change and automations you can implement.
Endowment effect is your enemy. We always start valuing the systems/processes we already have in place at a higher value than usual. Start having honest opinion on ROI. If it is NOT adding value, you should be ruthless. Don't start implementing new systems in the place of old systems. Try to evaluate the entire chain of customer journey and see how it can be invented. In my previous experience new systems either brought revenue stream or reduced cost. Process changes always saved ton of money. One example from my career was when i asked my team how many change controls we reviewed from our L2 team really failed our validation. The answers was less than 2 %. Team able to categorize changes into high risk and low risk buckets. We removed review process on low risk changes and slowly crawled on to high risk changes with checklist, documentation and training of L2 team.
The question every leader should ask himself is how many processes or products you removed in your career life ? If the system/process is NOT adding value in the user journey or NOT adding to the bottom line , what are you doing about it. That's your tech debt.

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